Is there any good reason why politicians who leave or are voted out of office shouldn’t be executed?
I mean, OK, sure, technically they’re human and killing humans who don’t want to die is generally considered a bad thing. But putting aside issues of the relative morality of offing your no-longer-elected representatives for a moment and looking at the thing solely from a pragmatic viewpoint, is the benefit a society receives from having these guys around after they’ve screwed things up so badly they can’t get more votes than the other asshole great enough to justify their continued existence?
Sure, some politicians go on and do greatand admirable charitable works after their time in office. But most take cushy jobs on the boards of companies on whose behalf they screwed over their constituents, or charge thousands of dollars for speaking engagements, or take million dollar paycheques in exchange for allowing ghostwriters to try and minimize, or even justify their misbehaviour while in office.
Why should these people be allowed to use what’s supposed to be public service to enrich themselves (even more) in private life?
I don’t know about you, but I can never look at a politician without cynically wondering what their real game is, secure in the knowledge that whatever it is, serving the public interest will be, at most, a happy side effect of their real agenda. If I knew they were going to die shortly after they left office, I’d at least know that whatever their game was, it wouldn’t directly benefit them. And I suspect efforts to directly benefit their family members would, if discovered, be a definite vote loser, so “Sorry sis, but my incompetent nephew’s gonna have to get a cushy civil service job in his actual merit, no, I’d help him if I could but, y’know, if I did they’d fucking kill me.” Imagine the savings in ethics investigations if those with options to compromise their ethics knew doing so could be a one-way ticket to a gas chamber.1
That’s not even considering the savings that’d come in terminating these parasites: no pension plan payouts; reduced health care costs; no secret service agents wasted watching the ranch for ten years; no millions of dollars spent avoiding a trial for war crimes…
Hell, these guys’ deaths could actually generate money. Ringside seats for the firing squad would go for hundreds of dollars plus TicketMaster’s gouging, and those who couldn’t afford to be there live could watch it all live on pay-per-view! Plus, letting people vote on the type of death a politician voted out of office receives would probably convince more people to vote than trying to get the lesser of x number of evils into office currently does.
If we killed officeholders who lost the public’s confidence, they might actually feel beholden to the public they claim they serve, rather than the corporations that fund their campaigns. If 70% of the country wants universal health coverage and you won’t need it in a couple years if you don’t give it to them, how much time are you gonna spend with bullshit delaying tactics and toothless reforms designed to protect the obscene amount of money pocketed by insurance execs? You wanna quit before your term is over? Sure, no problem–now you’re the one who’s going to be shot at from helicopters next time out.
The type of people running for office would change dramatically overnight. Off the top of my head, I can conceive of only two personality types who’d volunteer for public office if they knew they were going to die when it was all over: people who actually, legitimately wanted to help the public, and the “Batshit? Batshit isn’t crazy, I’m crazy” insane. Either way, it’d make campaign debates a damn sight more entertaining:
Moderator: Mr. Goode, how do you feel about the disparity in income between society’s wealthiest members and everyone else?
Max Goode (Canadian Idealist Party): We have polls indicating that 90% of people don’t see a problem with a maximum wage that cuts off a single person’s potential earnings at $500,000 a year. When I’m PM, I promise I will institute just such a wage freeze, or die trying.
Moderator: And how do you feel about the distribution of wealth in society, Mr. Bilderberg?
Mohammed Tiberius Bilderberg (Independent): Some people say Jesus had blue eyes, but I don’t think so. I say Jesus had brown eyes. I AM THY LORD RETURNED! BOW DOWN BEFORE ME OR, OR–O MAN, THERE AREN’T EVEN WORDS TO DESCRIBE HOW SMITED THOU SHALT BE!
Anyway…
I’m sure I’m missing something here, but at this wonderfully amitriptyline-infused moment, the idea seems like a winner to me. What am I missing, other than the ability to focus on anything more than a couple inches in front of me?
Next on “Prescription Medication-Induced Reflections with Andrew Foley”: Is there any good reason not to eat the entire board of Goldman-Sachs and use their ground-up bones as an aphrodisiac?
- Well, a two-way ticket, really, but they wouldn’t be able to enjoy the scenery on the way out. [↩]
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So there’s a pill for Joker-style Super-sanity, and you can get a prescription for it?
That’s the best argument for Canada’s health care system I’ve heard.
“the “Batshit? Batshit isn’t crazy, I’m crazy” insane. ”
See… here’s the problem with this catagory: at least a third of the elected Republicans down in the States are this type of politician (with the rest of the party being shameless corporate apologists)
Think of the crazy shit that politicians will do to stay in power now, when all that they stand to lose is a political office.
Now think of what kind of crazy shit they’d do to stay in power if the stakes were potentially lethal.
1. Lighthill is totally right. You’ll have a military dictatorship in no time.
2. The post-booting pension is meant to attract talented but not wealthy people to politics – if you’re not independently filthy rich, would you like a job which you may hold for three years then be booted out because of someone else’s (i.e. party leaders’) incompetence?
3. Instead of killing them, why not place them in a minimum wage job until retirement age, with the risk of death if they’re incompetent? Now, there’s an incentive to better working conditions.
“at least a third of the elected Republicans down in the States are this type of politician”
I’d like to believe that many of those politicians aren’t insane people, they just play them on C-Span. It’d be interesting to see which of them actually have the courage of the convictions they espouse and which are just playing to the Glenn Beck contingent.
lilacsigil: I’d suggest insisting the only thing post-bootees get after leaving office is the pension, with everything they earn flipping burgers or whatever in private life going back into government coffers, but that’s almost a reasonable position, and I hate taking those.
>Next on “Prescription Medication-Induced Reflections with Andrew Foley”: Is there any good reason not to eat the entire board of Goldman-Sachs and use their ground-up bones as an aphrodisiac?
I’m pretty sure they have lethal levels of saturated fats.
Well, Winston Churchill lost his seat in parliment in 1908 and 1922, as well as his party losing the election in 1945. Nonetheless, he was a pretty good PM, at least in the war. A politician leaving office doesn’t mean they can’t come back, nor should it.
He’s a pretty good case for politicians who’ve lost power by democratic means going back. The public not liking someone at one time doesn’t mean that they can’t be good, and do well on a electoral return. This seems incredibly poorly thought out.
Democracy really doesn’t mean the public knows what’s best for them. If nothing else, certain officials subsequent re-elections show that… [
Yep, I still miss the pre-groupblog days.
Nice. You gonna advocate eating babies next?
[Swift reference, “A Modest Proposal”, for anyone who doesn’t get it.]
Sure, this seems like a great plan, apart from all of the flaws, risks, drawbacks, and chaos it would cause! I’m all for it! I think I’ll write my Congressman and…
Oh. Right. Don’t suppose they would pass a “kill us all” bill, would they?
Why not just kill everyone that reaches the end of their career path? Maybe give people 1 year after retirement to travel or spend time with the kids or grandkids, then a big party and a dignified walk into the soylent plant.
Or a lottery to determine who is stoned. With rocks, not marijuana.
Well, Winston Churchill lost his seat in parliment in 1908 and 1922, as well as his party losing the election in 1945. Nonetheless, he was a pretty good PM, at least in the war.
Yes but he also gassed the kurds while in charge of a region of the world currently called “Iraq”, an offence against humanity that has since been duplicated once, and that second person was actually executed once he ended up forced out of political office.
I was utterly aware of that while saying so. Debated mentioning it, but thought it wasn’t really worthwhile. It was, after all, while he was in another office than the one I was speaking of here…
However I would say that the second person wasn’t voted out, so that’s totally irrelevant to this discussion.
My point still stands.
I know this is satire. It’s bad satire. From what I can tell the whole point is to display your cynicism and work in an insult to a particular politician. So rock on. Just because I don’t laugh doesn’t mean I don’t understand that it’s a joke.
I know I post under the most generic name possible. One of the reasons I do that is because, as I’ve mentioned defore, I actually work in state government. I am a public servant. I work for a with people who are on a statewide and sometimes national stage. Hell, my father held elected office for 20+ years. So maybe I take this sort of thing too personally. There are crooks, jerks, pervs, and morons that get elected. That old saw about getting the sort of representation you deserve has more that a little truth to it. I don’t know what this article adds to the conversation except more corseness and ill-feeling.
So in that spirit: Fuck you.
While I can definitely see the appeal in killing politicians, I don’t think this is a very good system you propose. What it would do is insure that the only people willing to run would be those so obsessed with power that they’re willing to die to get it. We get way too many power-hungry psychos already.
A better system would be to execute politicians who enact blatantly unconstitutional laws. This would help preserve freedom, even to the extent of causing politicians to avoid anything that might be even remotely unconstitutional. As opposed to the current situation in which they keep passing slightly different versions of bills whenever one is shut down by the courts.
Were you just making that up about 90% of Canadians supporting a maximum wage law of $500,000? That sounds fanatically Socialist even for Canada.
I really doubt if very many Americans would ever support such a thing. It would crush all their pipe dreams of becoming millionaires.
But it would also crush all the dreams of people who are already millionaires, and people are nothing if not petty.
Wow. Some people are taking this way too seriously.
Personally, I think that anyone willing to run for office on the national level should be disqualified as a power mad egomaniac. We should draft them instead. To prevent corruption, we can liquidate any investment holdings, and put it in an account whose payout is based on the U.S. economy (suggestions welcome) at the end of his term, and forbid future employment beyond a generous government pension .
Any takers?
Main problem with that is: who’s in charge of drafting them?
Oh, fine. Bring up a good objection. See if I care.
How about if the state governors draft one of their own for president, and state legislatures draft their federal level counterparts from their own number? Let them counterbalance themselves that way. I figure it should weed out most of the real loons.
@John
8 years and 10 days ago, my fiance and unborn child died a painful, fiery and very untimely death because a skirt-chasing, publicity-loving politician and a money-grubbing, corporation-fellating politician decided that there was no reason to even attempt to corral a mentally insane terrorist who’d engineered multiple attacks on the American people. Adding insult to injury, the terrorist in question was almost literally handed on a silver platter to the skirt-chaser, who refused to take him for fear of lowering his approval ratings. Then the terrorist was ignored by the money grubber in a combined lack of concern for anything that didn’t involve earning money for his friends and business associates or relaxing on his multi-million dollar ranch.
So, with all due respect given on my end, fuck you and every single “politician” (root words-“poli”, meaning “people”, and “tic”, meaning “blood sucking insect”) on the planet. Because all of the currency that you and your kind has earned (monetary, emotional and egotistical) is well worth the lives of all of the people who you destroy underfoot.
In summation, I hate all of you. If it were possible, I’d connect every single one of you to my mind so that you could share every single one of the dreams that I’ve endured for the past 8 years. Dreams so bizarre, violent and pathetic that they’re ensured that any night in which I don’t drink at least a pint of rum or vodka will result in my waking up at 3AM in a cold sweat. Unlike me, though, your loved ones will be therre to comfort you. My loved ones, however, are in a pile of ashes in some God-forsaken landfill.
Fuck you until the day that you die.